The whores on the hill. That’s the nickname that Georgetown Prep boys gave us, the students at a sister school, an all-girls Catholic prep school.

The students at these elite schools are groomed to be charismatic, upstanding leaders in society. This, however, does not mean that the upstanding leaders of today could not have committed unspoken venalities in their youth. Put another way, the defense that “the person I know could not have done such a thing” is specious.

Like Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, I began my freshman year of high school in 1979. I attended the Academy of the Holy Cross while he started at Georgetown Prep. Like him, I was raised in Montgomery County, Maryland. Like him, I attended Beach Week, the week of debauchery when Catholic high school students take over Ocean City before the public school kids get out for the summer. Like him, I hosted and went to parties where underage drinking was the norm.

To be honest, getting “wasted” was the norm. It was easy. The one thing you can count on with Catholic families is that they include many kids, which meant older siblings were available to help us acquire alcohol.

I do not know Kavanaugh or accuser Christine Blasey Ford personally, but I lived the culture in which they came of age.

When Kavanaugh gave a speech in 2015 at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law and stated, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. That’s been a good thing for all of us, I think,” he summed up the culture perfectly. It was a culture of entitlement, particularly for some of the boys attending elite schools such as Georgetown Prep.

We all knew we would attend college. And we knew we would have opportunities afforded us because of our economic status and proximity to Washington, D.C., because of the connections our parents had and because of our education. We knew a barometer of behavior existed based on these social connections. We could be polite, engaging and captivating for the right audience at the right time. It was a social calculus.

Beyond that, the barometer created clear gender dichotomies. We were socialized, as good Catholic girls, to protect our chastity, which meant we had to protect ourselves against boys. In essence, we could socialize with the boys in our prep school circles, but it was our responsibility to control the boys because they could not be relied upon or expected to control themselves. Any failure in that department was our shame alone. And alone we carried it.

Indeed, that was how male entitlement worked. Boys were taught that they could take what they wanted. It was not their job to protect females. It was their job to protect each other from their misdeeds no matter how big or alcohol-fueled. The boys kept each other’s secrets.

The view that teenage boys hold of girls when puberty is in full bloom comes as a surprise to no one. However, that view can become distorted when boys attend elite gender-segregated high schools. The absent gender is more easily dehumanized. She becomes a vehicle in which sexual urges can be satisfied without any reflection on the consequences of how the task took shape. After all, she is the whore on the hill who let it happen. Add alcohol, and the sexual assault may not be remembered at all.

Mark Judge, an alleged witness to the assault against Ford at the high school party, reflected on this culture in his memoirs. He recalls the underground newspaper he ran at Georgetown Prep detailing the alcohol-laden social scene. There’s a picture at a teacher’s bachelor party with his students drinking and taking in the striptease show. A yearbook entry describes Kavanaugh as the treasurer of the Keg City Club and a member of Beach Week Ralph Club.

But there’s also the letter of 65 women assuring us their memory of Kavanaugh was of an honorable and respectful boy. I don’t doubt that. There was always the barometer.

Not all boys behaved in this manner. But some otherwise nice boys did engage in sexually aggressive behavior, especially when inebriated, without consequence. That Kavanaugh is an upstanding judge without even a “little blemish on his record” and thus could not have done what Ford asserts is a logical fallacy. Kavanaugh’s blemishless record is likely more a testament to the code of secrecy (or amnesia) among his school peers than a mark of his good character.

Based on the facts revealed, I do not know with certainty whether Kavanaugh attempted to sexually assault Ford. However, a sexually aggressive inebriated boy can also be an honorable-seeming boy, who matures into the role of a supportive coach, mentor and loyal friend. Both types of character traits can co-exist. One does not explain away the other.

In other words, the virtues of adulthood do not mean the drunken iniquities of youth did not happen.

Deirdre M. Bowen is a law professor at Seattle University School of Law.